


Every Waking Moment

by serafine



Category: The X-Files, The X-Files: Fight the Future
Genre: Angst, F/M, UST, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-04
Updated: 2013-01-04
Packaged: 2017-11-23 17:34:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/624773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serafine/pseuds/serafine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A sleepless night - set shortly after the first X-Files movie</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Waking Moment

**Author's Note:**

> My first fanfic.

Scully was tired. More tired than she had ever been in her life, it seemed.

Turning her head, she smiled at Mulder. He had insisted on driving her home after the OPR meeting. True - they had gone for dinner first, his treat for a change. The past few days were a blur - airports and airplanes and the occasional night spent in a motel - _somewhere._ Not to mention the blessedly short hospital visit.  Pulling up to her apartment, Mulder asked her, "Do you need anything, Scully? Are you going to be okay tonight?"

The pat answer of 'I'm fine' started to tumble out of her mouth no. He deserved more than that. "Yes, Mulder, I am. No I don't need anything. Thank you." Reaching out, she took his hand and squeezed it. "I just need a little rest. I'll call you tomorrow - okay?"

"Alright - sleep well."

Scully stepped out of the car and headed towards her building. Stopping in front of her door, she pulled out the small, shiny set of keys. A Marvin the Martian keychain looked back at her. Yet another thing that Mulder had gotten for her. The old set had been lost somewhere between DC and the ends of the earth... focus. focus. Just sleep. Everything else would come later. Scully reached up and touched her cross. She and Mulder were both alive and well, despite frighteningly long odds. They even had all their toes, for heaven's sake. What right did she have to complain about anything?

Locking the door behind her, she kicked off her shoes and headed into the kitchen, peeling off and dropping clothes as she went. She smiled at the sight of the badly folded blanket on the arm of her sofa. Mulder had tried to be neat, at least. One multi-vitamin and glass of juice later, Scully went into her bedroom and found an old, soft satin nightgown and slipped it on, relishing in the simple pleasure of being clean, dry, and warm.

Crawling into bed, she wondered how it was possible to still hurt in as many places as she did. The muscles of her face, sore from being literally frozen in place, protested as she closed her eyes and yawned. Swallowing was still a delicate process, and there were still odd little twinges of pain throughout her abdomen. There were still scrapes everywhere, not to mention the lovely red latticework of blood vessels across her face.

Stretching out Scully sighed and waited to drift off.... and couldn't. Rolling over, she stretched and relaxed again, closed her eyes and . Nothing. She just laid there looking at the ceiling.

She just kept tossing and turning, unable to get comfortable. Her mind kept going - it simply would not relax. Her disjointed thoughts kept running the events of the past few days over and over again like some sort of broken slide projector...

*click*

** Mulder's one and only nightmare of the trip came back to her. It had happened the first time he had managed to go to sleep after their rescue from the ice. They had been in an airplane and he had curled up against the wall of the cabin and finally fell asleep, and she had started dozing not long after. Mulder's cries had woken her up about half an hour later. He had gotten twisted up in the blanket, and was calling out, "Scully - where are you? Scully!"  
  
She had grabbed his shoulder and shaken him awake. "Mulder. I'm right here. Mulder, wake up!" When he opened his eyes, they were bright with unshed tears and absolute panic. He saw her, gasped and made a visible effort to get himself under control. She had spent the next hour of the trip with his head on her shoulder, and her hand clutched in his.**

*click*

** Throughout their journey home, Mulder would reach out and touch her for no apparent reason, or she would turn to find him staring at her with wonder in his eyes, almost as if trying to reassure himself that she was there, and everything was fine. **

*click*

**Mulder spent last night on her couch, and she had not heard one nightmare the entire time. Before Scully went to bed, he had hugged her hard. As he was pulling away, his hand went to her cheek and it was trembling slightly. Mulder looked like he wanted to say something, but hadn't. It was almost as if he was fighting his urge to coddle her, to mother her. As it was, Mulder treated her as if she were something terribly fragile, that might shatter at any moment. Scully tried to let him care for her - she wanted to let him care for her, but wasn't she supposed to be the strong one? **

*click*

** Somehow, Scully couldn't believe she had gotten out of that icy hell. Mulder had followed her to the end of the earth, not knowing whether he would find her alive or if he would find her at all. Scully suspected, somehow, if he hadn't found her, Mulder would never have come home, would never have had the will to go back. **

*click*

** Coming back this time had been vivid and violent. Not like last time. No warm, gentle drift back to reality, no encouraging sweet words guiding her back home - oh no. Breaking ice and terror and freezing, invading cold and through it all, Mulder's frightened voice calling her name.**

*click*

** He had been terrified while she was gone - Scully knew it like she knew her own name. The last time she had been taken from her apartment. This time she had been taken from him - almost literally ripped out of his arms, paralyzed by some strange "virus" invading her body. It must have been worse for him this time. He would probably think he could have done something to stop them, to save her immediately. But he couldn't have. They would have just shot him in the hallway instead of in the street, and they would both be dead. **

....but they weren't dead. They were alive. Try to focus on something else...

** Why did they always have to wind up someplace cold? Why could they ever go someplace warm. Maybe a beach **

.....argh! Sleep, Dana, just try to sleep, Scully told herself. She was home, safe and sound, relaxed and comfortable and she couldn't go to sleep. It was as if she couldn't come down off the adrenaline high that had been the only thing keeping her and Mulder going recently. She could look at his face and tell that he practically hadn't slept while she was gone, and looking in his haunted eyes told her of the horrors that had played across his mind when he did.  
  
Concentrating on the slow journey of air in and out of her lungs, the expansion and contraction of her rib cage, she managed to start to drift off...

...and found herself back in that damned glass coffin.  
That blasted refrigerated alien incubation tank.

To her conscious mind it had almost been like blinking - one moment she had been collapsing to the floor in Mulder's hallway after their...his...confession to her, and the next she had been naked, cold and covered with goo on the other side of the world. But her subconscious had been aware the whole time, carefully recording the events surrounding her, much like when she was in her coma. And in the darkness of her bedroom, it started to feed those events back to her.

After the "paramedics" had taken her out of Mulder's building, she knew things weren't right. **Mulder! Mulder, please, these aren't the paramedics - they're taking me again - help... MULDER!!!** They didn't act quite like paramedics - she had seen enough in her time to know. Then they were putting her in this thing...

The journey to the ice had been a blur, she was just cold and cold and cold...

Suddenly there was light. Bright, but she was still cold, colder in fact. And there were strange hands on her - taking off her clothes. She was too scared to be angry. There was something horribly wrong with her - she could feel it. They gave her a very quick examination and started putting this thick tube down her throat. Her own body had betrayed her again - she couldn't fight them, and her larynx was paralyzed so she couldn't even scream - and somehow that was the one of the worst parts of all.

She remembered the.. creature growing inside her. Scully could feel it, and the tube down her throat, in some sick, obscene parody of the children she could never have. But instead of being confined to her womb, her entire body would be its' incubator and its' sustenance.  _God - please don't let it end like this - I survived being taken, I survived the cancer, and now you're going to let me die like this?_ She remembered her feverish pleas and prayers and curses to the Almighty. Scully tried to pound at the glass, but she couldn't move her arms.

Confined, freezing, and paralyzed. Doomed to die a horrible death in the ice and the darkness at the end of the world. No one would ever find her.   She strained and struggled and howled in her mind...

Her own screams and sobs brought her awake. Scully clutched and fought her way out of the tangled covers. Tears were streaming down her face and her throat was unbelievably sore. Every muscle in her body was tensed, and she could still feel the fluid surrounding her.

Reaching out in the darkness, she searched blindly for reassurance... for safety... for... for Mulder. *it was just a dream it was just a dreamjust a dreamjustadream* Scully shook and rocked and tried desperately to ground herself in reality. She was in her bedroom at home. Warm, no creatures, no ice, no cold goo or horrible tubes.

As she finally came to full consciousness, Scully realized this had been the first time in days and days it seemed, that he had not been by her side. Up until now he had been with her all the time - every waking moment. Mulder understood what she'd been through, would understand the nightmares.

Last night on the way home from the airport, they had stopped by his apartment while he dashed upstairs for a clean suit and overnight bag, and then they had gone to her apartment. She had called her mother as soon as she stepped off the plane, and the only reason she got to go home instead of to her mother's was because Mulder had assured Maggie that he would take care of her, "whether she likes it or not". Mulder had spent the night on her couch. Scully had come so close that night to asking him to sleep with her - nothing else, just sleep. She hesitated because she didn't know how he would take it considering what had happened between them. The thought was almost as good as the deed, wasn't it?

Or so her Catholic upbringing would have her believe. And they had both thought about it - very definitely were about to. So, asking Mulder to share her bed would have been in bad taste at the least.

He had hovered at her apartment that morning while she showered and dressed for the OPR meeting. She considered calling him now. If he was asleep, she certainly wasn't going to wake him up, and he had already worried himself enough over her. What would she say? Mulder - I had a nightmare... would you come be my teddy bear? She laughed at herself. That would go over real well. Go ahead, Dana, destroy whatever semblance of a functioning working relationship that you've got left with the man.

And then she thought about it - Mulder would come to her, no questions asked. He always did and he always would. That was a sobering realization.  
Sighing heavily, she got up to fix herself some tea. Maybe then she might be able to get some real sleep...

***********************  
the end

thanks for reading

serafine

 "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."  
\- Wesley The Princess Bride

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted: Nov. 6, 1998 (wow!)
> 
> Original Author's Note:  
> This is something that came to me in the middle of my own sleepless night. This is my second attempt at posting, so if it is seen on another archive in a slightly different variation, my only excuse is that my roommate's computer ate the original. This is a restructured version from a hard copy draft. Thanks to my fellow "focused" friend Amy and my non-focused roommate Janin for proofreading. This is my first try at fanfic, so any feedback would be greatly appreciated.


End file.
